“Reagents”: A Pocket Encyclopedia of Reagents for Organic Chemistry

Reagents is a new app for iPhone and iPad that gives you all the key information about the most commonly encountered reagents in undergraduate organic chemistry courses.

Here’s the key features of Reagents:

Profiles of over 80 reagents, along with their key reactions.

Examples of each of the representative reactions of each reagent. There’s hundreds of example reactions in all, from commonplace to obscure.

A “Favorites” List – so you can make your own list of only the reagents which are most important to you. You can always modify your list as you progress through the course.

And for a limited time it’s also free.

What does this mean for you?

More efficient studying. Spend less time hunting down information: all the key details for every reagent are accessible in seconds.

Less time being lost in class. Need a refresher on that reaction? Forgotten what that reagent does? You can look each reagent up in a snap.

Study wherever you go. It’s all on your iPhone – so you can finally cut that umbilical cord between you and your textbook.

My students describe having this problem a lot:

They’re working away on their homework and suddenly need to remind themselves of what a certain reagent (let’s say NaBH4) does. So they have to pull out their 1000 page textbook to look it up. Except… the textbook points them to multiple pages, some of which are relevant, some not. After a minute or two, they get the information they need. Until… five minutes later, when they need to do this again, and again. Hunting through a huge textbook for tiny pieces of information can be a pain.

What students kept telling me is that they wanted an “abridged textbook” that covered all the reagents in organic chemistry.

To help solve this problem, I developed the Reagent Guide, which puts all the reagents of organic chemistry on your desktop.

Now, in collaboration with Metamolecular, the Reagent Guide has been adapted for the iPhone and iPad.

The result is Reagents – a pocket encyclopedia of all the most common reagents in organic chemistry. It gives you the comprehensiveness of a textbook, but with all the convenience of a mobile app.

Now you can answer the question, “What does that reagent do again?” in a few seconds. And then go back to your work.

In other words, you can spendless time searching for information and more time actually studying.

Hey, did you see that Reagents is free?

(But act now, because it won’t be free forever. This is a limited time offer.)

Lots of interest in an Android version. Funny thing is I use the Reagent Guide primarily on my Android. I have a PDF viewer app. It would be easier to navigate if it were in an actual ‘app’ form, but I don’t have much trouble as it is, it would just be nice to be able to search (which I can’t do on my PDF viewer on my Android).

Thanks for the interest – those who want a droid version have not been shy, and that’s great. I agree in wanting to make search an option for the Reagent guide – the problem is in how it was made in a pretty old-school way (chemdraw to PDF) and a future version should correct that. Not sure it will be soon however.

There are extra summary sheets and mechanisms for reactions. It’s also something you can print out and have on your desktop. Regarding price, I think the Reagents app is ridiculously underpriced for what you get.

About Master Organic Chemistry

After doing a PhD in organic synthesis at McGill and a postdoc at MIT, I applied for faculty positions at universities and it didn’t work out, yada yada yada. So I decided to teach organic chemistry anyway! Master Organic Chemistry is the resource I wish I had when I was learning the subject.